Quiz: Women Who Rock

How much do you know about some of these great female musicians? Careful—the questions get harder as you go.

1. Her video for “Love Is a Battlefield” was the first to include dialogue as well as the musical performance.

2. She worked at the Playboy Club before her band had its first U.S. hit with “Heart of Glass.”

3. Before this new-wave frontwoman formed her wildly successful band in 1978, she attended Ohio’s Kent State University—and was on campus during the 1970 Kent State shootings.

4. Rolling Stone magazine featured only two women on its 2003 list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. This 1980s rocker was one of them. (Joni Mitchell was the other.)

5. Publications from Rolling Stone to the Village Voice heralded her band’s sophomore album—1994’s Live Through This—as a musical masterpiece. Time even called it one of the top 100 albums of all time.

6. Born in Scotland and the daughter of a big band singer, this rock star studied piano at the City of Edinburgh Music School before joining her first band at the age of 16…and that’s no “garbage.”

7. This gravelly voiced rocker was a member of her high-school glee club before hitting it big in the 1960s. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.

8. She’s been called “punk’s poet laureate” and is one of America’s most influential singer-songwriters, yet she’s had only three Top 20 singles in her career—“Because the Night,” written with Bruce Springsteen, is the best known.

9. This influential punk and new wave groundbreaker changed her name in the 1970s because, she says, people would “stare at my surname and could not pronounce it.” She picked her new name as an homage to a Native American tribe because she “hated cowboys.”

10. This San Francisco rocker went to the same college as first daughter Tricia Nixon, and has been called the “Queen of the Summer of Love.” But she retired from music in the late 1980s and today works as a painter.